Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.
The data
I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:
query {
monthlystats {
date_checked
softwarename
total_posts
total_users
total_comments
}
}
Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:
jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'
(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments)
Then did a good old’ chart
What to think of it
I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice
I do feel we need more users, but not just users. It’s “niche” users we need. There’s a lot of techies on the threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin), but not enough people who care about other stuff.
So communities outside that, struggle to thrive.
But we are not going to get “niche” users if we don’t get large numbers of users. Niche interests will only come up here when the population is so large that even the long tail ends up with critical masses.
Those defending “quality over quantity” miss this exact point.
My point about “niche” is that from the current perspective, the niche communities is the more regular ones, because at the moment, the majority of users here is technical. We need more ordinary users, not just more users.
We scare normal, non-techie people away. The Threadiverse in general and Lemmy in particular is very lacking in moderation capabilities, especially by not federating mod reports across instances (PieFed does that, but Lemmy does not).